昆德拉曾說：「異議，不是一種令人亢奮的榮耀，而是一種荒謬的沉重負擔。」今年四月剛過八十大壽的捷克文學家昆德拉，一九七五年起便因批評當局而流亡遷 居法國，異議分子始終是他身上的標籤。然而，他一貫淡然面對外界，理性、謹慎而低調，廿多年來堅持拒絕媒體採訪，只以文學發聲。
《印刻》文學雜誌一月推出「小說王─米蘭.昆德拉」專輯，以超過一二○頁內容，收錄昆德拉的五篇短文評論、昆德拉與義大利詩人及評論家里 贊泰（Massimo Rizzante）的對談，及近廿篇重量級作家對昆德拉小說的評論，包括作家魯西迪評《玩笑》、卡爾維諾評《生命中不能承受之輕》等。絕大部分內容都是中 文世界首譯，昆德拉插圖手稿也將曝光。
向大師致敬 《印刻》推百頁專輯
專輯中的五篇昆德拉隨筆，發表時間橫跨一九八五年至二○○七年，包括他對翻譯的見解及他對劇作家尤涅斯柯（Eugene Ionesco）、西班牙作家好友阿拉巴爾（Fernando Arrabal）、荷蘭小說家赫爾蒙斯（Willem Frederik Hermans）等的評論，文中展現了他的機智、博學與特有的幽默感。
例如，有人批評尤涅斯柯「該丟進歷史的垃圾桶」，昆德拉便以諷刺筆調反擊：「可不是，整個歐洲不 久都要進垃圾桶了。那些還知道什麼是藝術的人，就只好去翻垃圾桶了。」此外，他引述有人說翻譯就像女人─美麗的不忠實，忠實的不美麗，他反駁「這是我聽過 最愚蠢的說法」。他認為，只有忠實的翻譯才美麗，因翻譯需要想像與創意，而小說家不只需要想像，還要有精準掌握語義的天分，「在這一點上，普魯斯特的嚴謹 絕不下於笛卡爾。」
籌畫了一年 盼喚起諾貝爾重視
印刻出版社社長初安民表示，他對昆德拉這麼重要的作家卻未得諾貝爾獎，感到奇怪和疑惑，這個專輯既是對昆德拉致敬，也為「喚醒」諾貝爾獎 對他的重視。專輯籌畫了整整一年，邀請旅法的藝文評論家尉任之任客座總編輯，居間聯絡、收集文章，逐步取得昆德拉的信任。尉任之是作家尉天聰的兒子，現為 巴黎第一大學電影研究所博士候選人，他在專輯前言中表示，在巴黎與昆德拉夫婦只隔一河而居，雖從未見過他，但對他非常尊崇，也相信昆德拉在巴黎找到了精神 上的原鄉，「一個拉伯雷、狄德羅理性精神曾先後昂揚，和一個在十八世紀曾勇敢放蕩過的文明。」
他並描繪昆德拉「是一個影子裡的人與作家」，總讓自己站在一個與社會保持距離、疏離的觀察點上。
Make a sudden blow or fierce verbal attack. For example, The mule lashed out with its hind legs, or After listening to Dad's criticism of his driving, Arthur lashed out at him. [Second half of 1500s]
| 聖誕節的回憶 |
| A Christmas Memory, One Christmas, & The Thanksgiving Visitor |
 |
| 作者：楚門．卡波提（Truman Capote） |
這是卡波提享譽世界文壇的經典之作，
這是村上春樹情有獨鍾的「純真小世界」，
這是寒冷冬天裡永遠存在我們心中的一座溫暖壁爐，
而你，可以將這個溫暖傳遞出去──
送給身邊或遠方的親朋、認識或不認識的人──
內贈四張彩色手繪燙金卡片，讓您在寒冬中溫暖朋友的心靈。
《聖誕節的回憶》是美國傳奇作家卡波提的童年故事集，也是世界文壇中短篇小說的經典之作，備受眾多國際大作家的推崇，例如村上春樹便對之情有獨鍾，甚至擔任它的日文譯者。
卡 波提本人也十分珍愛這本短篇故事集，他曾將之製作為電視劇，並親自配錄旁白。這部榮獲艾美獎的黑白影片如今在網路上仍然可見，而書本身也長銷不墜。本書和 他的名作《冷血》風格極為不同，透露出卡波提不為人知的純真溫柔。就像村上春樹說的，這本書就像一個讓人流連難忘的「純真小世界」。
繁體中文版謹以精緻禮物書的形式呈現給讀者──希望它就像寒冬裡的溫暖爐火，讓人感受到人與人、天地萬物間無私的愛與包容。
●作者介紹
楚門．卡波提（Truman Capote, 1924.9.30～1984.8.25），少時父母離異，他輾轉寄養在不同親戚家，連母親也很少見面。也許為了彌補甚或掩埋自小遭受雙親遺棄的創傷，卡波提少年時，就將自己深鎖在一個幻想的小天地裡。
八歲時卡波提開始了寫作生涯，十九歲時以短篇小說《蜜苒》贏得歐．亨利獎。著名文學批評家約翰．赫金斯曾指出，卡波提早期的作品「都脫不了一些封鎖在孤僻角落中的陰晦人物，借著各色各樣的恐怖，飄蕩在死亡的舞蹈中。」
1948 年，他發表第一部小說《另外的呼聲，另外的屋子》，被譽為「最令人激賞的美國年輕作家的處女作小說」。1958年，他的成名作《第凡內早餐》問世，書中女 主人翁荷莉．葛萊特麗是一位古怪而可愛的流鶯，經由奧黛麗．赫本的銀幕詮釋，深深打動了千萬影迷與讀者的心。1966年，他寫作生涯中的高峰代表作《冷 血》出版，僅僅兩週即躍登美國暢銷書第一位，且雄踞了一年多之久，一向對他不假辭色的書評界，亦讚譽有加。
名利雙收，讓卡波 提成為百萬富翁，成為上流社會的寵兒，但他也因為耽溺於放蕩生活，文學生命陷入停頓。除了短篇文集之外，不曾再出版過小說。1984年8月25日，卡波提 死在洛杉磯友人家中，留下這樣一句話：「我是個酒鬼。我是個吸毒鬼。我是個同性戀者。我是個天才。即使如此，我還是可以成為一個聖人。」
“很抱歉打扰你，”一位读者写道，“我的姐夫，高盛(Goldman)的一位资深银行家，希望圣诞节得到一本‘很烂'的商业书籍作为礼物，我想，你对此可能略知一二。想必还可以趁此机会设一项商业烂书奖？这个领域理应设立这样的奖项。谨致问候。”
我的第一个想法是，人们在圣诞节会互赠稀奇古怪的礼物。
有一年，我婆婆收到一件钩针编织的弗拉明戈舞者玩偶，身上的裙子正好可以完全遮盖住成卷的卫生纸，从而避免了没有遮挡的卫生纸可能引起的一切尴尬。 很难理解为什么会有人想要钩针编织的卫生纸套子，而为什么会有人想要一本很烂的商业书籍，更加让人想不通。我尤其奇怪的是：一、为什么一名高盛的资深银行 家开口要这样的东西；二、送他一本烂书是否是负责任的做法。在没有受到鼓励的情况下，最近银行家关于商业的坏思想还不够多吗？
我的第二个想法是，是的，我相当了解商业烂书，是的，这个领域确实可以设个奖项。每年出版的商业图书有数千种——其中多数似乎都会被堆到我的办公室，在我周围摆得到处都是：箱子里、桌子上、地板上，在柜橱上摇摇欲坠。其中绝大部分是烂书，有些尤其烂得透顶。
无论内容还是风格，都能以烂冠之。内容通常毫无看头——大的宏观商业观点常常流于肤浅，小的微观商业观点则往往枯燥无味。风格也同样不可指望。对擅长写作的作家来说，爱情和死亡这类题材，通常比现金流和贝塔系数更有吸引力。
环绕在我周围的许多商业书籍，从封面上看就很差劲。上周送到办公室的一本书叫做：《向复杂性成本开战——通过解决流程、产品和组织复杂性，重塑你的 成本结构，解放现金流，提高生产率》(Waging War on Complexity Costs – Reshape Your Cost Structure, Free Up Cash Flows and Boost Productivity by Attacking Process, Product and Organizational Complexity)。这个书名看得我浑身乏力，甚至没法翻开书来看看里面写着什么。假如作者真的要向复杂性开战，这个标题或许是不错的出发点。
有些书不仅烂，还危险。凯特琳•弗里德曼(Caitlin Friedman)和金佰利•约里奥(Kimberly Yorio)合著的《快乐工作、快乐居家》(Happy at Work, Happy at Home)封面上印着一位苗条的年轻女子，身着粉红色开襟毛衫，一手抱着咯咯笑的婴儿，另一只手在笔记本电脑上敲敲打打。这完全是不负责任的。除非孩子睡 得正香，或是在用PlayStation 3全神贯注地玩“现代战争2”游戏，否则，一边照顾孩子一边工作绝不会是让人开心的事情。
一本烂得更严重的书是爱德华•德•博诺(Edward De Bono)的《思考！在为时已晚之前》(Think! Before It's Too Late)。德博诺的观点似乎是，自从古希腊人以来，没有人进行过正确的思考——除了德•博诺自己以外。遗憾的是，从目录页来判断，他要进行任何新的思考 都为时已晚：他不过是重弹横向思维和《六顶思考帽》(Six Thinking Hats)的老调。
德•博诺不是唯一认为古人有其作用的商业书作者。我列出的2009年度烂书奖入围名单中的另一本书是《董事会会议室里的苏格拉 底》(Socrates in the Boardroom)，该书其实与苏格拉底或董事会会议室都无关，而是讲为什么一流研究型大学应由学者来领导。由此，我可以联想出一长串的同系列图书： 《厨房里的苏格拉底》、《卧室里的苏格拉底》、《楼下卫生间里的苏格拉底》……
尽管这些书都很烂，但没有一本比得过肯•布兰佳(Ken Blanchard)的《谁杀死了变革？》(Who Killed Change?)。书里讲了一个“机智的侦探故事”：一位科伦坡(Columbo)式的侦探，调查一个名为“变革”之人的谋杀案件，他审问的嫌疑犯包括欧 内斯特•紧迫(Ernest Urgency)、克莱尔•沟通(Clair Communication)和彼得•绩效管理(Peter Performance Management)。这本薄薄的图书文字吃力，内容俗套、弱智、乏味之至，最终得出如下结论（以首字母大写的形式印刷在最后一页上）：“一个组织的变 革，只有在该组织的常见角色将其独特才能结合起来，并在发起、实施和维持变革时始终让其它角色参与其中的情况下，才会成功。”(Change Can Be Successful Only When The Usual Characters In An Organisation Combine Their Unique Talents and Consistently Involve Others In Initiating, Implementing And Sustaining Change.)
对此，我不太了解，我只知道，“在大小写字母正当使用的情况下，句子的效果更好”。(Sentences Are More Successful When Upper and Lower Case Are Used Properly)
我也知道，那位读者的银行家姐夫会很高兴地在他的圣诞节长袜中，发现这本书。
译者/何黎
蒙田[1]（Michel de Montaigne，1533年2月28日－1592年9月13日），文艺复兴时期法国作家，以《尝试集》[2](Essais)三卷留名后世。《尝试集》在西方文学史上占有重要地位，作者另辟新径，不避谦疑大谈自己，开卷即说：“吾书之素材无他，即吾人也。”(je suis moy-mesmes la matiere de mon livre.)[3]
目录[隐藏] |
生于波尔多附近的佩里戈尔（现在的多尔多涅省），为家中长子。家族为殷实商人，从事鱼、酒的国际贸易。家中信奉天主教，蒙田一生坚持旧教信仰，但有几个弟妹后改奉新教。其父在意大利当过兵，吸收了一些新颖的教育思想。六岁以前寄宿在农村家庭，以农民夫妇为教父母，并由只说拉丁文的老师教导，因此以拉丁文为母语。少年时代，在吉耶讷学院(Collège de Guyenne)习希腊文、法文、修辞术，因拉丁语流利，多在拉丁剧中担任主角；后来到图卢兹（一说巴黎）习法律。
1557年起在波尔多最高法院(Parlement de Bordeaux)任职，并认识博埃蒂(Étienne de la Boétie)，成为莫逆。1561年至1563年在查理九世的宫廷出入。1563年博埃蒂离世，大受打击。1565年成婚，儿女多夭折，唯一女长成。1568年父亲离世，袭其封号与领地，成一家之主。1571年起退居蒙田堡(Château de Montaigne)，潜心写作。
宗教内战期间，为旧教的亨利三世和新教的纳瓦拉的亨利居间调停。1578年起为肾石所困扰，1580年至1581年游法国、德国、奥地利、瑞士、意大利等地，散心之余，寻找疗法。回国后出任波尔多市长直至1585年，并继续增修《尝试集》。59岁病逝于蒙田堡。
为完成父亲的遗愿，将西班牙神父兼医生塞朋德(Raymond Seybond)的著作《自然神学》(Theologia naturalis)由拉丁文译成法文。1564年该书的序文被教会列为禁书，但蒙田将序文部分大幅修改，译本也在1569年顺利出版，后来被多次翻印。
首两卷《尝试集》在1580年出版，三卷版付梓于1588年，死前蒙田还在病榻上增订该书。学者习惯将蒙田的思想分为三个阶段（尽管未必准确）：斯多噶时期（1572─74年）、怀疑主义危机（1576年）、伊壁鸠鲁时期（1578-92年）。三个阶段的思想也粗略反映在三卷《尝试集》中，卷二的〈为塞朋德辩护〉(Apologie de Raymond Sebond)一文，被认为代表了蒙田的怀疑主义思想，该篇也是《尝试集》里最长的一篇（后世很多出版商将这一篇独立成书）。
后人也将蒙田的《旅游日志》(Journal de voyage)和书信（现存39封）整理、出版。
| 从维基姊妹计划了解更多有关“蒙田”的内容： | |
|---|---|
 | 维基词典上的字词解释 |
 | 维基教科书上的教科书和手册 |
 | 维基语录上的名言 |
 | 维基文库上的源文 |
 | 维基共享资源上的多媒体资源 |
 | 维基新闻上的新闻 |
| 主要作者 | Rey, Robert | ||
| 書名/作者 | Honoré Daumier / text by Robert Rey ; [translated by Norbert Guterman] | ||
| 出版項 | New York : Abrams, 1985 | ||
| 版本項 | Concise ed | ||
| 總圖2F藝術資料區 | N6853.D38 R48z 1985 | 1583328 | 可流通 |
| 主要作者 | Delteil, Loys, 1869-1927 | ||
| 書名/作者 | Honoré Daumier : [oeuvre lithographiae] / Loeys Delteil. -- | ||
| 出版項 | Paris : Delteil, 1925-1930 | ||
| 總圖2F藝術資料區 | NE2415.D2 D45 v.1 | 2427386 | 可流通 |
| 主要作者 | 杜彌爾 (Daumier, Honoré, 1808-1879) |
| Daumier, Honoré 1808-1879 | |
| 書名/作者 | ドーミエ諷刺画の世界 / 喜安朗編 |
| 出版項 | 東京都 : 岩波, 2002 |
| 總圖2F藝術資料區 | 947.35 4411 | 2242697 | 可流通 |
| 主要作者 | 蘇 茂生 |
| 書名/作者 | 根斯勃羅Gainsborough雷諾爾兹Reynolds羅伊斯達Ruisdael荷加斯Hogarth多米埃Daumier / 蘇茂生著 |
| 出版項 | 臺北市 : 光復, 民68[1979] |
| 總圖2F密集書庫 | 947.5 4462 v.10 | 2028386 | 可流通 |
Bibliography
See his Teachers and Students (tr. 1970); catalog raisonné ed. by K. E. Maison (2 vol., 1968); biography by R. Rey (1985); studies by K. E. Maison (1960), O. Larkin (1966), H. P. Vincent (1968), and J. L. Wasserman (1969).
How is a church like a can opener? Among the pleasures of using evolutionary logic to think about matters nonbiological, one is getting to ask questions like that. The evolutionary take on a cultural fact like religion or warfare can cut through the fog of judgment and show how a social institution solves some mechanical problem of human co-existence. What function did intergroup violence serve? What are gods good for?
THE FAITH INSTINCT
How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures
By Nicholas Wade
310 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95
Nicholas Wade’s book “The Faith Instinct” is at its best when putting us through such exercises and sidelining the by-now tiresome debates about religion as a force for good or evil. According to Wade, a New York Times science writer, religions are machines for manufacturing social solidarity. They bind us into groups. Long ago, codes requiring altruistic behavior, and the gods who enforced them, helped human society expand from families to bands of people who were not necessarily related. We didn’t become religious creatures because we became social; we became social creatures because we became religious. Or, to put it in Darwinian terms, being willing to live and die for their coreligionists gave our ancestors an advantage in the struggle for resources.
Wade holds that natural selection can operate on groups, not just on individuals, a contentious position among evolutionary thinkers. He does not see religion as what Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin called a spandrel — a happy side effect of evolution (or, if you’re a dyspeptic atheist, an unhappy one). He does not agree with the cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer that religion is a byproduct of our overactive brains and their need to attribute meaning and intention to a random world. He doesn’t perceive religious ideas as memes — that is to say, the objects of a strictly cultural or mental process of evolution. He thinks we have a God gene.
So how did this God gene flourish? Wade’s counterintuitive answer repurposes an old social-scientific analysis of religion as a saga of biological survival. Rituals take time; sacrifices take money or its equivalent. Individuals willing to lavish time and money on a particular group signal their commitment to it, and a high level of commitment makes each coreligionist less loath to ignore short-term self-interest and to act for the benefit of the whole. What are gods for? They’re the enforcers. Supernatural beings scare away cheaters and freeloaders and cow everyone into loyal, unselfish, dutiful and, when appropriate, warlike behavior.
Wade walks us briskly through the history of religion to show how our innate piety has adapted to our changing needs. Hunter-gatherers were egalitarian and, shamans aside, had direct access to the divine. But when humans began to farm and to settle in cities and states, religion became hierarchical. Priests emerged, turning unwritten rules and chummy gods into opaque instruments of surveillance and power. Church bureaucracies created crucial social institutions but also suppressed the more ecstatic aspects of worship, especially music, dance and trance. Wade advances the delightfully explosive thesis that the periodic rise of exuberant mystery cults represent human nature rebelling against the institutionalization of worship: “A propensity to follow the ecstatic behaviors of dance and trance was built into people’s minds and provided consistently fertile ground for revolts against established religion,” he writes.
There’s a safari-hatted charm to Wade’s descriptions of what he calls, a little jarringly, “primitive” religion, filled with details of the rites of tribes cut off from the modern world but still available for anthropological observation. But his sketches of Judaism, Christianity and Islam rush by quickly and confusingly and offer only superficial accounts of the spread of those faiths, which was in each case a dicier process than Wade makes it sound. (What if Constantine had held out against the Roman Empire’s Christian factions, instead of converting?) Judaism’s strict moral codes, he argues, held together the rival states of Israel and Judah in Biblical times and provided comfort to Jews in exile, but failed to accommodate the more diverse Jews of the first-century Hellenic world. Early Christians adapted Judaism’s attractive but exclusivist mores to a society that had outgrown tribalism, succeeding “so well that they captured an empire and defined a civilization.” Wade embraces a radically revisionist approach to Islam, which holds that it evolved out of a Syriac branch of Christianity whose members believed that Jesus was human and rejected the Trinity. This sternly monotheistic remnant was Arabized when a new dynasty needed to differentiate itself from a previous one. If the revisionist version of Islam is correct, Wade writes, it “furnishes a case study of how a religion can be adapted with great success to a state’s purposes.”
Wade would probably deny that being adaptive makes any religion better in a non-evolutionary sense than any other. His scientist’s neutrality slips toward the end of the book, however, when he starts making the case for Religion with a capital R. Like Robert Wright in “The Evolution of God,” Wade wants to defend religion from so-called “new atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, who see it as a malignant illusion. In chapters on religion and trade, religion and warfare, religion and nation, and the “ecology” of religion — the way in which religion regulates fertility and population size — Wade argues that our religious disposition can enhance social and national unity, manage scarce resources, even solve the tricky problem of how to get young men to die for the greater good when that’s called for. But Wade also knows that the faith-based preference for the group has engendered genocide, mass suicide and maladaptive cargo cults. Perhaps that is why he declines to draw one inference that proceeds from his arguments: that individual religions can be compared and ranked and, well, approved or disapproved of, since a religion can be good only insofar as it’s useful.
In any case, Wade says, religion is not going away, because it’s imprinted on the human genome. The first part of this claim is hard to argue with. The second part is probably true, too, but raises the question of how. Wade’s vision of religion as a socializing force is persuasive, but he does not do enough to distinguish socially efficacious religious beliefs from, say, socially efficacious political ideologies. There are biologically or at least neurologically grounded accounts of religion, like Boyer’s, that more successfully capture the weird particularity of religious experience while also revealing its tentacles in many other facets of mental and emotional life. Ask yourself: Why are our gods always equipped with recognizably human minds, even when they’re animals? How do sacred stories differ, if they do, from fairy tales, or from novels? What are holiness, impurity and ritual, exactly, and are they religious in essence, or categories implicated in everything we think and do?
The problem, to my mind, is not that Wade has overambitiously linked genetics and religion. It is that he has underambitiously portrayed religion as less encompassing and consequential than it is. Can we really isolate as distinct adaptations the magnificently bizarre and oddly satisfying behaviors and feelings crammed into that drab pigeonhole of a word, “religion”? I would have thought that would amount to explaining what makes us human.
MODERNISM
The Lure of Heresy From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond.
By Peter Gay.
Illustrated. 610 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $35.
| Edition | 1st ed. |
| Description | xxii, 610 p., [16] p. of plates : ill. (some col.) ; 25 cm. |
| Bibliography | Includes bibliographical references (p. [511]-563) and index. |
| Contents | A climate for modernism -- Professional outsiders -- Irreconcilables and impresarios -- Painting and sculpture : the madness of the unexpected -- Prose and poetry : intermittences of the heart -- Music and dance : the liberation of sound -- Architecture and design : machinery, a new factor in human affairs -- Drama and movies : the human element -- Eccentrics and barbarians -- Life after death? -- Coda : And Gehry at Bilbao. |
| Summary | Historian Gay explores the modernist rebellion that, beginning in the 1840s, transformed art, literature, music, and film with its assault on traditional forms. Beginning his epic study with Baudelaire, whose lurid poetry scandalized French stalwarts, Gay traces the revolutionary path of modernism from its Parisian origins to its emergence as the dominant cultural movement in world capitals such as Berlin and New York. This book presents a pageant of heretics that includes (among others) Oscar Wilde, Pablo Picasso, and D. W. Griffith; James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot; Walter Gropius, Arnold Schoenberg, and (of course!) Andy Warhol. Finally, Gay examines the hostility of totalitarian regimes to modernist freedom and the role of Pop Art in sounding the death knell of a movement that dominated Western culture for 120 years.--From publisher description. |
| Subject | Modernism (Art) Arts, Modern -- 19th century. Arts, Modern -- 20th century. |
| ISBN | 9780393052053 (hardcover : alk. paper) 0393052052 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
| Research Call Number | JQE |
Spoiler alert: The hero dies at the end, but shed no tears. Modernism, the artistic revolution that began with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire in the 1840s and quietly expired in the 1960s with Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes, enjoyed “a good long run.” So Peter Gay concludes in the final sentence of “Modernism: The Lure of Heresy From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond,” his sweeping survey of the poets, playwrights, painters and architects who set out to rewrite the rules of art, transform consciousness and, wherever and whenever possible, shock the complacent middle class.
Peter Gay
MODERNISM
The Lure of Heresy From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond
By Peter Gay
Illustrated. 610 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $35.
Actually, Mr. Gay points out, that complacency has been greatly exaggerated. All revolutions require an enemy. The Modernists found theirs in the bourgeoisie, a fat, convenient target but also a source of support and encouragement. Enlightened curators, like Alfred Lichtwark at the Hamburg Kunsthalle, and art dealers like Paul Durand-Ruel in Paris, helped prepare the ground for the eventual victory of Modernism’s disorganized troops.
“Businessmen of culture offered and sold artistic products, whether dramas, drawings or volumes of poetry, and with the same gesture advanced the aesthetic cultivation of the buying public,” Mr. Gay writes. The road was long and difficult, but never quite as lonely as the artists themselves often saw it. Their isolation, was, in part, a self- created myth. “If my work is accepted,” John Cage once said, “I must move on to the point where it is not.”
Mr. Gay, the eminent historian of the European Enlightenment, Weimar culture and Sigmund Freud, has spent the greater part of the 1980s and ’90s chronicling the sensibility and cultural life of the Victorian middle class in his five-volume series, “The Bourgeois Experience.” It makes some sense, then, that he should now turn to the artistic avant-garde dedicated to pulling the rug from under the oppressive father figures of the 19th century. Otherwise it is hard to locate the motivation for yet another general work on a movement whose every breath and gesture has been subjected to minute study by legions of historians.
Mr. Gay adds little new in what amounts to a college survey course. A graceful writer, he leads the reader on a pleasant ramble through a well-traveled landscape, pointing right and left to the prominent features along the way and, like a superbly informed guide, offers his thoughts and comments. From seminal figures like Baudelaire and Flaubert, he moves right along to the Impressionists and then, taking the various art forms in turn, advances chronologically through the great debacle wrought by fascism and World War II before wrapping up with such postwar phenomena as Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.
He has a thesis. Modernism, he argues, was propelled by two main impulses: the urge to overturn established hierarchies and break rules — this is what he means by “the lure of heresy” — and a compulsion to explore the artist’s interior world. These primal drives produced “a single aesthetic mind-set,” a “climate of thought, feeling and opinion,” unifying what might appear to be a scattering of disconnected artistic revolts.
Armed with this pair of organizing principles, Mr. Gay sets forth down his well-traveled highway. Prodigiously well informed, he covers a broad expanse of ground quickly, touching on most of the major figures but also bringing in lesser names, like the German playwright Georg Kaiser, who make the great galaxy of Modernism twinkle a little more brightly. Smart bits of description (the Guggenheim Museum as a fat white oyster) and well-chosen anecdotes speed the narrative merrily along, but rarely does Mr. Gay heed the greatest Modernist injunction, attributed to Sergei Diaghilev: “Astonish me!”
Mr. Gay’s enthusiasms and his insights are unevenly distributed. On painting, especially 19th-century painting, he rarely rises above banality. Edvard Munch, a second-rater by most estimations, gets promoted to the first rank, largely because his psychological obsessions dovetail with Mr. Gay’s Freudianism.
Literature, music and architecture, especially the pioneering architectural and design work of the Bauhaus movement, bring out his most insightful writing. Mr. Gay, in the chapter “Eccentrics and Barbarians,” takes a bit of a detour to profile wayward figures like Charles Ives and Knut Hamsun, the “anti-modern modernists.” These are the most engaging pages in the book, offering shrewd analyses that reveal how easily Modernism could embrace retrograde political thinkers and the seeming paradox, in the case of Ives, of an artistic revolutionary and small-town philistine inhabiting the same man.
The Freudian tinge lends a distinctive coloration to familiar material. Mr. Gay does have the odd habit of checking in from time to time to see what Freud thought of this or that Modernist, to no particular purpose. But he also delivers a splendid Freudian interpretation of Kafka’s work as embodying displaced conflict with his father. He also calls T. S. Eliot sharply to account, rejecting Eliot’s assertion that the poet hovers, detached, above the poem, an impersonal artificer. As implicated in Modernism’s interior voyage as any other poet, “Eliot was wrong.”
After World War II, Mr. Gay finds “much talent and little genius.” Pop Art’s erasure of distinctions between high and low art, crucial in his mind to the Modernist project, spelled the end of the great human adventure that began a century or more earlier. But Mr. Gay is not quite ready to sign the death certificate, especially after a visit to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, designed by Frank Gehry. A twitch here, a jerk there, and who knows? There may indeed be life after death.
***
Clockwise from above: Le Corbusier brought a modernist sensibility to architecture, Flaubert to the novel and Baudelaire to poetry.
Thomas Mann was an archmodernist, and this was his favorite story: One day, Gustave Flaubert was out walking with his sister. Ferociously antibourgeois, Flaubert lived alone, unconsoled and unencumbered by marriage or family. His novels mocked and maligned the French middle class, ironizing it into oblivion. He was a great frequenter of brothels and had fornicated his way through Paris and Cairo. And yet here he was out for a stroll, suddenly stopping in his tracks before a small house surrounded by a white picket fence.
In the yard, a solid middle-class father played with his typical middle-class children while wife and mother looked lovingly on. The enemy! Yet instead of holding his nose, Flaubert gestured toward the house and exclaimed, without irony: “Ils sont dans le vrai!” (“They are in the truth!”) For Mann, the delightful incident illustrated the tension between the outrage at conventional life and the yearning to be part of it that tore at modernist psyches. There is more to aesthetic rebellion than offends the eye.
Surprisingly, the anecdote doesn’t appear in Peter Gay’s “Modernism: The Lure of Heresy,” a massive history of the movement in all its artistic forms — painting, sculpture, fiction, poetry, music, architecture, design, film (though, bafflingly, not photography, one of the chief catalysts of the modernist revolution). It’s all the more surprising because I once heard Gay cite Flaubert’s droll little stroll in a lecture, after which he brilliantly analyzed the episode’s every paradoxical nuance.
If anyone is aware of the complexity of modernist attitudes, it is Peter Gay. He is the country’s pre-eminent cultural historian and the author of masterpieces of social and intellectual reimagining including “The Enlightenment,” “Weimar Culture,” “Freud” and the towering multi-volume study “The Bourgeois Experience.” Such achievements make it all the more dismaying to find that in this rich, learned, briskly written, maddening yet necessary study, Gay’s formidable syntheses often run aground on lapses of knowledge and judgment.
Gay’s new book is the only one I’m aware of that tries to make sense of modernism in all its incarnations. Gay takes up his subject from the outset of the movement in the late 19th century to what he considers its continued vitality after World War II and its eventual death and possible resurrection in our own time. This comprehensiveness makes “Modernism” essential, especially for the general reader who wants to get a handle on Western culture’s most enigmatic phase. (A gift of this book and “The Rest Is Noise,” Alex Ross’s magisterial history of modern music, would equal about three years of college.) But unlike Henry Moore’s giant sculptures, in which negative space plays a positive role, Gay’s omissions and miscomprehensions cry out to be filled in and corrected. And yet, at times, the book is so nimbly erudite that its stubborn flaws make it all the more richly challenging.
For example, Gay knows that the image of the modernist as committed subverter of custom and convention is hackneyed. He writes in his introductory chapter that the idea of modernists as “scofflaws or mavericks massed against the solid verities of time-honored high culture and, usually, Christian faith” is one of the avant-garde’s “cherished fairy tales.” The Impressionists, for instance, didn’t care a whit about outraging official culture, or Christianity. But because Gay needs the “lure of heresy” to thematically structure his book, he often ends up not just reinforcing the caricature of modernists as unhappy outsiders and elitist malcontents, but inflating it.
It is almost as if Gay were perversely determined to undermine his own profound awareness of modernism’s multifaceted and contradictory nature. On the one hand he astutely writes, “The sources of the modernist rebellion in the arts rose from all quarters of the political, intellectual and emotional world.” On the other he speaks of “two essentially distinct areas of art, high art and low, which modernists had thought it crucial to keep apart.” But it was the modernists who brought the energy of everyday life into high art! Think of the scraps of newspapers and advertisements in the collages of Picasso and Braque; of the parodic newspaper headlines and the music hall ditties in Joyce’s “Ulysses”; of Leopold Bloom wiping himself with a newspaper in the notorious book that appalled Virginia Woolf (and delighted T. S. Eliot); or of the Dadaists’ total collapse of serious art into the quotidian, or Mahler’s quotations of nursery rhymes or Stravinsky’s saxophones — the list of the modernists’ elitist democratizations is interminable.
What a relief it is to read Gay debunking the myth of Kafka the grim depressive with a description of friends who “laughed heartily” when Kafka read drafts to them. Kafka’s fiction is about the comedy of sexual frustration and the humor of competitive paranoia, among other things. What really broke up Kafka’s friends was the first sentence of “The Trial”: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” Neurotic guilt was their collective métier.
Yet although Gay writes beautifully about Kafka, about Proust on grief, about authentic middle-class hunger for modernist liberations and about the final scene of recognition and unspeakable shame in Chaplin’s “City Lights” — to take just four examples among many — he seems to find it more useful to traffic in cardboard simplicities. There are a disconcerting number of these.
Gauguin did not, for example, abruptly quit his job as a stockbroker in Paris, as both popular legend and Gay would have it. He was fired by his firm, which had just gone under. You might say it was respectable society that had sacrificed Gauguin to the bottom line running just underneath bourgeois rhetoric about compassion and decency. No wonder the artist took off for what seemed to be the primitive explicitness of Tahiti.
Nor did the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch pay, as Gay writes, “the usual price” for his unsettling innovations. Munch was not doomed to “being misunderstood, neglected, rejected,” or to enjoying only “occasional appreciation.” He sold his first paintings at age 18 and three years later was invited to exhibit in the Norwegian section of the World’s Fair in Antwerp. At 26 he had his first one-man show, hailed by prominent art critics; two years later, Norway’s National Gallery, the country’s most prestigious art museum, purchased one of Munch’s works. By the time he was 40, Munch enjoyed international renown and the largesse of several wealthy patrons.
And it’s right for Gay to refer to Munch’s countryman, the odd, fierce peasant novelist Knut Hamsun, as a public admirer of the Nazis who wrote enthusiastically about them even as the Germans were occupying Norway. But it is wrong for Gay not to add that during his one meeting with Hitler, Hamsun so aggressively pressed the Führer to stop executing Norwegian resistance fighters and to loosen his repressive hold on the country that Hitler loathed Hamsun for his insolent disrespect.
As for Gay’s Parisian modernist “outsiders,” if the French provided the most extreme assaults on Western rationality — Rimbaud’s “disorientation of the senses,” André Breton’s celebration of primal instincts stored in the unconscious, André Gide’s enthusiasm for the “motiveless” crime, Antonin Artaud’s “Theater of Cruelty,” Maurice Blanchot’s declaration of the death of the author — the reason was simple. It was not that French conditions kept creating figures resembling Baudelaire, about whom Gay histrionically writes that he was “an outcast aware of his loneliness” — though, as Gay admits, Baudelaire lived at the center of Parisian cultural energy. In France, civilization is invincible and eternal. Its immutable stability makes opposition to it all the more cheerfully ferocious. You can hurl the most incredible rhetorical and intellectual violence against French custom and convention and still have time for some conversation in the cafe, un peu de vin, a delicious dinner and, of course, l’amour. And in the morning, you extricate yourself from such sophisticated coddling — the result of centuries of art and artifice — and rush back to the theoretical barricades.
But Gay, in thrall to Freud, prefers to root the modernists’ adventures in family trauma. Baudelaire, he writes, suffered a “revolution at home” after his father died and his mother married a “dashing” military officer. The poet and essayist, Gay simplistically tells us, “never quite worked through his expulsion from paradise.” Yet you would think that the author of the culture-shifting “Fleurs du Mal,” and of the equally seminal essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” had worked his way through everything that required working through.
In Charles Dickens’s “Little Dorrit,” a shrewd entrepreneur constantly condescends to his inventor friend by stressing what it pleases him to see as his friend’s pathetically impractical maladaptation to life. In fact, the inventor is fundamentally nothing of the kind. In a similar way, Gay falsely stresses the “cherished fairy tale” of modernist darkness, depression and miserable discontent. But Dada, for instance, was not “wholly negative,” as Gay describes it, any more than Munch or Kafka was wholly negative. Hannah Höch’s and Sophie Tauber’s dolls and puppets, Duchamp’s optical illusions in the form of whimsical machines and especially the cool, broken harmonies of Kurt Schwitters’s collages and fantastical life-size constructions were all imbued with the positive spirit of humor and play.
Even more radical are Gay’s misperceptions of modernism’s fundamental nature. It is not accurate to say, as Gay does, that in modernist fiction, “modernist mirrors reflected mainly the author.” Joyce, Proust, Mann, Lawrence, Woolf, Gide all wrote great realist novels that were as concerned with minutely noting the external world as with projecting intensely personal visions of the world. Elsewhere, Gay seems to acknowledge this, too. About Baudelaire, he writes, “Like the modernists who came after him, he was a realist with a difference.” Perhaps Gay simply wants to say that Baudelaire is a symbolist poet, and that surreal or highly subjective images coexist in his poetry alongside “realist” evocations of mental states and physical reality. In any case, it would have been helpful for Gay to explain his nice phrase “realist with a difference” and then go on to apply it to his other modernists. But he never elaborates on the distinction and never returns to it.
On the disheartening conundrum of modernists and politics, Gay is at his most bewildering. He writes of “liberalism, that fundamental principle of modernism.” He seems to have momentarily forgotten that Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence and Céline on the right, and Picasso, Gide, Breton and the Russian modernists (barely alluded to by Gay) on the left, were about as far from liberalism as a Cubist painting is from an iPod — not to mention the toxically snobbish Woolf, who was neither right nor too much left. For Gay, reactionaries like Eliot and Hamsun were “anti-modern modernists.” But he does not try to account for the fact that reactionaries like the Italian Futurists worshipped modernity’s speed and power. Nor does he grapple with what you might call hypermodernists: the utopian Russian avant-garde, who, far from being political reactionaries, threw in their lot with the Bolsheviks.
The question of why so many modernists were drawn to regimes that were sick parodies of the modernist quest for transcendence and absolutes is unanswerable. But perhaps here is where some psychologizing could be useful. Perhaps beleaguered by the mental burden of their intensely personal visions, the modernists looked at a totalitarian regime’s real-life version of their fanaticism and perfectionism and wearily exclaimed, “They are in the truth!” Thus they contrived the delusion that actual power made a home somewhere in the world for their solitary ideals. It could have been a mental trick that protected their egos from mortal wounds.
Gay traces the modernist impulse through the post-World War II period to our own time, where he finds it in the work of Frank Gehry and Gabriel García Márquez. Yet he doesn’t have much admiration for the postwar epoch. “There was much talent and little genius,” he writes about the decades after 1945. Is it so, however, that T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens “produced no creditable heirs”? Not even W. H. Auden, who is not discussed by Gay? (“Lay your sleeping head, my love / Human on my faithless arm” — in one stroke, Auden could invoke modernist despair and affirm human hope.) But then, Gay never discusses Brecht’s dramas, either, though those quintessentially modernist works changed theater forever, especially in the ’60s. Conversely, Gay’s survey of postwar American art almost exclusively refers to the intensely biased and partisan — toward his own dubious theories, that is — Clement Greenberg, which is like quoting a Jesuit on the character and history of Protestantism.
Indeed, Gay’s inclusion of postwar art in a history of modernism makes little sense. Modernism was modernism only when the rising foundations, beams and struts of modernity were still visible. Once modernity became an enveloping condition, artists who were part of that condition — from Pollock to Warhol, from Robbe-Grillet to Grass, from Artaud to Pinter — rebelled as much against modernist Prometheanism as against the modern inadequacies that provoked it.
The Abstract Expressionists’ pure formalism was the end of the road for painting, not the exciting beginning of a new frontier. Malevich, Kandinsky and Mondrian all thought they had embodied a universal spiritual language in aesthetic form. Rothko wanted only that his canvases make people cry. DeKooning painted his scary women to make viewers laugh when they recalled Western art’s idealizations of women. And Pollock wanted nothing specific at all — Greenberg stuffed his theories into Pollock’s mouth. After modernity’s catastrophic climaxes — the Holocaust, Stalin’s gulags, Hiroshima and Nagasaki — postwar art aimed both to lower the boom on modernist euphoria and to ridicule modernism’s earnest despondency. Mann may not have been right when he wrote in his novel “Doctor Faustus” that modernism could only produce works of art that parodied earlier epochs. But in our own time, we seem mostly to be surrounded by art that parodies the various strains of modernism.
For all that, it’s painful to list the inadequacies in “Modernism.” Despite its failings, Gay’s book touches on so many relevant ideas and issues, subjects and themes, that it rouses us to a keen awareness of our own condition. Consider the second part of his thesis. Gay argues that along with the “lure of heresy,” what characterized the modernist rebellion was its “celebration of subjectivity.” If there’s anything that speaks to us now, it is the question of the “I,” that barbell of a pronoun that is so hard to lift in just the right expressive way. It is often provocative to watch Gay pursue modernist representations of the self.
Yet you wish that in Gay’s countless references to what he regards as the modernists’ cultivation of inwardness, he had made an important distinction between the modernists and the Romantics. It was the Romantics who stressed subjectivity. By contrast, the modernists emphasized the idiosyncrasy of personal vision as a way to flee from subjectivity. Knut Hamsun called this an “unselfish inwardness.” Gay means the same thing when he writes of “disinterested subjectivity” in his discussion of “Ulysses.” But he never returns to the idea.
The single reference Gay does make to Romantic inwardness occurs in the chapter on Baudelaire. It’s anybody’s guess as to what Gay means when he writes that the most sophisticated Romantics rejected “unchecked subjectivity.” Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Goethe in “Werther” — all these “sophisticated” Romantic authors were, by the standards of their age, “unchecked” in their subjective outpourings. But Gay seems to think it was the Romantics, not the modernists, who restrained their introspections.
On the contrary. Every modern revolution finds its point of resistance in the personal experience of those in revolt — that is, in a heightened subjectivity. The Romantics substituted genius and unique personality for aristocratic birthright and class, thus giving birth to the bourgeoisie. As Rousseau famously wrote, “I feel my heart, and therefore I know humankind.” But by the time the modernists came along, the bourgeoisie had conventionalized Romantic individualism into the petty assertions of ego.
And so the modernists sought to replace personality. They dissolved it in an impersonal creative vision that was nevertheless uniquely individual. Unselfish inwardness. When Eliot wrote that poetry was “not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality,” he was thinking along Hamsun’s lines. “The Wasteland” doesn’t tell us anything specific about Eliot’s personality, but it could have been produced only by Eliot’s personality. To put it another way, the Romantics exalted the self, but the modernists exalted the idiosyncratic — the intensely individualistic — escape from self.
Perhaps the bourgeoisie’s origins as the revolutionary class account for its facile assimilations of cultural subversions. Throughout his book, Gay marvels at the middle class’s capacity to absorb its adversaries. It’s an old story. But there is a difference between Artaud and HBO. We have exhausted Romantic individualism, and we have twisted the uniquely individual, modernist escape from the self into “self-expression.” Expression is everywhere nowadays, but true art has grown indistinct and indefinable. We seem now to be living in a world where everyone has an artistic temperament — emotive and touchy, cold and self-obsessed — yet few people have the artistic gift. We are all outsiders, and we are all living in our own truth.
Lee Siegel’s “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob” will be published next month.
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 叢書名稱： | 政治觀念史稿‧第6卷 | ||
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| 作 者： | (美)沃格林 | ||
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| 出版單位： | 華東師範大學 | ||
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| 出版日期： | 2009.08 | ||
內容簡介：《政治觀念史稿》的問題意識是：西方的現代性已經走到如此可怕的窮途，但現代性究竟怎麼回事情、又是怎麼來的？出生於自由主義思想之家的沃格林的這部“史稿”全面衝擊西方學界近兩百年來的啟蒙傳統觀念。
重 新認識西方大傳統是我國學界和大學教育的世紀性根本課題之一，且迫在眉睫……除非中國學人已經打算在西方現代性思想中安家並與某個現代或後現代“大師”聯 姻生育後代，否則我們就得隨時準各從頭開始認識西方傳統——就此而言，沃格林的“史稿”將是我們可能會有的無數次從頭開始的諸多契機之一。
作者簡介：英文版編者導言
在 撰寫本卷《政治觀念史》的過程中，沃格林遇到了一些“方法論的”問題，在他討論之前的歷史時期中那些政治事件和政治觀念時，這些問題被他迴避了，或者只是 間接做了些處理。沃格林對“材料”進行了系統性的分析，在此基礎上，被我們今天稱為歷史性的問題，正是《革命與新科學》所直接關注的對象。在本卷的第三章 中，沃格林討論了維柯（Vico）的《新科學》，這一章總體上完成於1941年夏天，而對維柯的討論成為了一次契機。沃格林對維柯的思考，以及對湯因比 （Toynbee）《歷史研究》的分析，最終換來了他有關“歷史起源”（historiogenesis）的思想，這一思想一直發展著，直到1974，在 《次序與歷史》第六卷中，對這一思想的最終描述發表出來。在討論維柯那一章的末尾，沃格林所得出的結論，證明了他的著名著作《新的政治科學》的開篇詞： “人在政治社會中的生存是歷史性的生存；而如果一種政治理論能深入到本源中，它必然同時是一種歷史理論。” 《新的政治科學》更應該被當作hommage a Vico加以閱讀，同時，無論怎麼說，這些最先在本卷《政治觀念史稿》中成為人們關注的焦點的這些論題，在隨後的超過三十年時間中，成為被廣泛分析的主 題。
圖書目錄：文版出版說明（劉小楓）
編者序言
第六部分革命
第一章離經叛教
一、重述基督教的時代
二、博舒埃與伏爾泰
三、歷史意義的重構
四、基督教與內在塵世問題的延續性
五、世俗化的動力
六、伏爾泰的攻擊
第二章分裂的民族
一、理性的真空
二、引發爭議的地域觀念
三、分裂的小世界
四、閉合過程的時間結構
第三章維柯：《新科學》
一、意大利的政治
二、維柯的著作
三、新科學的觀念
四、沉思的步驟
五、西方觀念的延續體
六、自然的模式
七、市民的世界
八、演歸進程與復歸
九、永恆觀念的歷史
十、共同意識
十一、進程的政治結構
十二、結論
第四章英國對具體的探索
一、典型的政體
二、對具體的喪失
三、絕對空間和相對性
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