THE LAST CHINESE CHEF : mise en abyme/ The Counterfeiters

The Counterfeiters 中譯本數本 替譬如說 孟祥森 1981

我這篇應是探討一本討論The Counterfeiters 中之 mise en abyme 之翻譯本

2007/8/31 我們需要索引來詳細審查一些術語 譬如說 本書翻譯成"重重深淵"的 :在第一章類似「紋中紋手法（mise en abyme）」(ミザナビーム(mise-en-abyme)とは、フランス語で「深淵に入る」と言う意味で、英語では"put in the abyss"と訳されます。 また、ミザナビームの別名として、入れ子構造の物語(Chinese box narrative)、 ...)

If the revelation of incommensurable "singleness" held me spellbound, it also generated fear. I would come back to the mise en abyme of one blazon within another, to that "setting in the abyss." I would consider a fathomless depth of differentiation, of non-identity, always incipient with the eventuality of chaos. How could the senses, how could the brain impose order and coherence on the kaleidoscope, on the perpetuum mobile of swarming existence?

根據 The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 它的定義為類似"千重鏡相或 盒中盒":

mise‐en‐abyme [meez on ab‐eem], a term coined by the French writer André Gide, supposedly from the language of heraldry, to refer to an internal reduplication of a literary work or part of a work. Gide's own novel Les Faux‐Monnayeurs (The Counterfeiters, 1926) provides a prominent example: its central character, Édouard, is a novelist working on a novel called Les Faux‐Monnayeurs which strongly resembles the very novel in which he himself is a character. The ‘Chinese box’ effect of mise‐en‐abyme often suggests an infinite regress, i.e. an endless succession of internal duplications. It has become a favoured device in postmodernist fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and others. See also metafiction.

譬如說 上圖為 『Le récit spéculaire: essai sur la mise en abyme』的英訳本。就是這方面的專書--讀者可看畫中有畫 (16世紀のクエンティン・マサイスという画家の作品に描かれた凸型の鏡について。)

The Kitchen God’s Girlfriend

Sion Touhig/Corbis

By HEIDI JULAVITS

Published: September 2, 2007

In 1893, André Gide coined the term mise en abyme — literally, “placing into the abyss” — to describe the technique of framing a story within a story. Contrary to what the TV show “Lost” might imply, mise en abyme does not translate as “evasive flashback device (signaled by spooky whooshing sound).” Ovid, Chaucer and Shakespeare nestled tales within tales to deepen the “reality” of their framing stories. More recently, the formidable abyss has been made safe for tour bus explorers by writers with less audacious literary itineraries.

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THE LAST CHINESE CHEF

By Nicole Mones.

278 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $24.

Related

First Chapter: ‘The Last Chinese Chef’ (September 2, 2007)

Nicole Mones’s third novel, “The Last Chinese Chef,” features a story interrupted by excerpts from a 1925 culinary masterpiece titled “The Last Chinese Chef” (also written by Mones), and is as unrelated to the old abyss as General Tso’s chicken is to an elaborate dish one of its characters makes from tofu and a sauce of 30 crabs. For this, Mones should not be faulted; her novel is more “Mostly Martha” than “Metamorphoses.” Still, it’s worth recalling the philosophical ambitions driving mise-en-abymers when savoring the works of these very distant offspring. Mones, who often writes about Chinese food for Gourmet magazine, ran a textile company in China for 18 years. The enthusiasms and expertise displayed in her embedded texts enrich but fail to rescue the frame story, a predictable 2-D romance about the healing powers of pork spare ribs in lotus leaf.

The plot: Newly widowed, workaholic Maggie McElroy is a columnist for Table magazine living on a boat in California. She discovers that her husband, a lawyer and frequent business-tripper to China, had an affair and possibly fathered his mistress’s child. Maggie must travel to Beijing to deal with a patrimony claim, as well as the emotional consequences of her husband’s infidelity.

Fortunately, Ruth Reichl — I mean Sarah — comes to the rescue with a work assignment. Sarah is Maggie’s guardian angel editor, and even though Maggie’s expertise is American food (“not the haute stuff, either”), Sarah greenlights her proposed profile of a Chinese-American-Jewish chef named Sam Liang. Sam is opening a restaurant in Beijing; he’s also translating his grandfather’s 1925 food classic, “The Last Chinese Chef,” into English. With her cook-off palate and her amiable foodie ambition, Maggie resembles a psychically wounded Rachael Ray. “Could the food in China be truly exceptional? It was possible, she thought now.” But only possible. Mones sketches her quaintly xenophobic protagonist with transformation in mind; in a story where the emotional journey mimics that of a Hollywood date movie, there can be no enlightenment without sweet cluelessness.

Eleven dutifully written pages into the book, Maggie is already in Beijing. She consults with her husband’s ex-colleague and nightclub buddy, then decides she must meet the 5-year-old girl who may be her husband’s daughter.

But first a more pressing issue arises: her article. Maggie shadows Sam — long-haired, sexy, publicity-allergic, an “old-fashioned formalist” (i.e., nothing like those showboating Ming Tsai types back in America) — a philosopher-chef prone to such Zen Master flashery as “food should be more than food.” Sam’s restaurant opening is put on hold, allowing him to wiggle out of his grudgingly agreed-to profile. But wait — Sam’s auditioning to be on the national cooking team for the 2008 Games in Beijing, the “Olympic competition of culture.” In other words, a perfect article redirect for Maggie and, more important, a perfect segue toward territory Mones herself is more fervent about — namely, the unique tangle of Chinese food and culture, and the ways both have been influenced by the country’s volatile political history.

But not so fast. There’s more, first, about the budding romance, neon lit to all except the lovebirds themselves, whose artificially delayed awareness provides ample opportunity for unintended double entendres. Observing Sam at work in his kitchen, Maggie realizes she likes “the rhythms of the sounds he made, and the raw, unblended smells.” Maggie’s hand, while she is awaiting Sam’s call, “crept into her pocket and lingered on her cellphone.” Later, as Maggie’s leaving for a massage, Sam looks at her “with a smile, one that seemed to penetrate through her shell to the inside of her, one that said, You’re about to feel good.” A reader can’t be blamed for talking back to characters when they express disbelief in their own paint-by-numbers plot. When Maggie thinks to herself skeptically, “As if food can heal the human heart,” this reader couldn’t help retorting: As if, Maggie McElroy!

While the Maggie-Sam romance achieves a wincing tolerability by the long-foregone conclusion, it functions primarily as a pesky garnish that prevents the reader from eating Mones’s entree — like fighting through a thicket of parsley to savor the eight-treasure dongpo pork obscured beneath. Mones becomes a far more relaxed and confident writer when freed from Maggie and her straitjacket of a recovery-via-food-and-love plot. Embedded texts offer her a way to fill in the back story and escape the stifling romance, and you can tell she feels liberated by them — there’s a captivating e-mail message from Sam’s father describing his own escape from Communist China, and equally absorbing excerpts from “The Last Chinese Chef.” Mones also permits herself point-of-view shifts; she movingly inhabits the head of the Chinese mistress’s mother, who traces the generational difference between her own life expectations and those of her post-Mao daughter. In addition to the evocative factoids Mones dots throughout — the shiny black floor tiles of the Forbidden City, for example, were soaked in oil for one year — she is admirably adept at capturing the limbo state of the American businessman stuck too long in a country where he will always be an exotic foreigner.

For some reason, however, Mones felt she needed a bland wonton skin to enclose the meatier interior of her book. Perhaps, as a cultural guest for decades, Mones worried she would overstep a hospitality boundary by writing entirely from the perspective of Chinese people. As Maggie notes when she arrives in Beijing, “she’d always loved to be the better tourist.”

Mones is clearly an exemplary tourist. She fails to fashion a convincingly escapist romance for the literary sojourner, but through her piquantly drawn minor characters, her researched “texts” and her invaluably quirky knowledge about Chinese culture and food, she serves us armchair travelers an inspiring meal we can almost, were it not for the parsley thicket of a framing device, taste.

Heidi Julavits’s most recent novel is “The Uses of Enchantment.”