THE AGE OF WONDER
How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
By Richard Holmes
Illustrated. 552 pp. Pantheon Books. $40
作者:丸山 一彦, 山下 一海, 出版社:Kodansha, 出版日期:1995-04-01
俳壇に狼火を上げた『寛保四年宇都宮歳旦帖』、高雅豊麗の四歌仙を一夜に巻いた『此ほとり』、新たに発見されて耳目集中の『安永三年春帖』、詩人蕪村の頂 点を示す『夜半楽』など、多彩な蕪村編著全篇と、七七忌『から檜葉』から十七回忌『常盤の香』まですべての蕪村追善集を収録。
併せて蕪村諧摺物十三種を挿図も含めて網羅し、後年「蕪村七部集」として盛行した俳書七篇を集めた。
蕪村一門の文学運動とその後の受容を、つぶさに検証する一巻。
In this big two-hearted river of a book, the twin energies of scientific curiosity and poetic invention pulsate on every page. Richard Holmes, the pre-eminent biographer of the Romantic generation and the author of intensely intimate lives of Shelley and Coleridge, now turns his attention to what Coleridge called the “second scientific revolution,” when British scientists circa 1800 made electrifying discoveries to rival those of Newton and Galileo. In Holmes’s view, “wonder”-driven figures like the astronomer William Herschel, the chemist Humphry Davy and the explorer Joseph Banks brought “a new imaginative intensity and excitement to scientific work” and “produced a new vision which has rightly been called Romantic science.”
THE AGE OF WONDER
How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
By Richard Holmes
Illustrated. 552 pp. Pantheon Books. $40
A major theme of Holmes’s intricately plotted “relay race of scientific stories” is the double-edged promise of science, the sublime “beauty and terror” of his subtitle. Both played a role in the great balloon craze that swept across Europe after 1783, when the Montgolfier brothers sent a sheep, a duck and a rooster over the rooftops of Versailles, held aloft by nothing more substantial than “a cloud in a paper bag.” “What’s the use of a balloon?” someone asked Benjamin Franklin, who witnessed the launching from the window of his carriage. “What’s the use of a newborn baby?” he replied. The Gothic novelist Horace Walpole was less enthusiastic, fearing that balloons would be “converted into new engines of destruction to the human race — as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in Science.”
The British, more advanced in astronomy, could afford to scoff at lowly French ballooning. William Herschel, a self-taught German immigrant with “the courage, the wonder and the imagination of a refugee,” supported himself and his hard-working assistant, his sister Caroline, by teaching music in Bath. The two spent endless hours at the enormous telescopes that Herschel constructed, rubbing raw onions to warm their hands and scanning the night sky for unfamiliar stars as musicians might “sight-read” a score. The reward for such perseverance was spectacular: Herschel discovered the first new planet to be identified in more than a thousand years.
Holmes describes how the myth of this “Eureka moment,” so central to the Romantic notion of scientific discovery, doesn’t quite match the prolonged discussion concerning the precise nature of the tail-less “comet” that Herschel had discerned. It was Keats, in a famous sonnet, who compared the sudden sense of expanded horizons he felt in reading Chapman’s Elizabethan translation of Homer to Herschel’s presumed elation at the sight of Uranus: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.” Holmes notes the “brilliantly evocative” choice of the verb “swims,” as though the planet is “some unknown, luminous creature being born out of a mysterious ocean of stars.” As a medical student conversant with scientific discourse, Keats may also have known that telescopes can give the impression of objects viewed “through a rippling water surface.”
Though Romanticism, as Holmes says, is often presumed to be “hostile to science,” the Romantic poets seem to have been positively giddy — sometimes literally so — with scientific enthusiasm. Coleridge claimed he wasn’t much affected by Herschel’s discoveries, since as a child he had been “habituated to the Vast” by fairy tales. It was the second great Romantic field of science that lighted a fire in Coleridge’s mind. “I shall attack Chemistry, like a Shark,” Coleridge announced, and invited the celebrated scientist Humphry Davy, who also wrote poetry, to set up a laboratory in the Lake District.
Coleridge wrote that he attended Davy’s famous lectures on the mysteries of electricity and other chemical processes “to enlarge my stock of metaphors.” But he was also, predictably, drawn to Davy’s notorious experiments with nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. “The objects around me,” Davy reported after inhaling deeply, “became dazzling, and my hearing more acute.” Coleridge, an opium addict who coined the word “psychosomatic,” compared the pleasurable effects of inhalation to the sensation of “returning from a walk in the snow into a warm room.” Davy passed out frequently while under the influence, but strangely, as Holmes notes, failed to pursue possible applications in anesthesia.
In assessing the quality of mind that poets and scientists of the Romantic generation had in common, Holmes stresses moral hope for human betterment. Coleridge was convinced that science was imbued with “the passion of Hope,” and was thus “poetical.” Holmes finds in Davy’s rapid and systematic invention of a safety lamp for English miners, one that would not ignite methane, a perfect example of such Romantic hope enacted. Byron celebrated “Davy’s lantern, by which coals / Are safely mined for,” but his Venetian mistress wondered whether Davy, who was visiting, might “give me something to dye my eyebrows black.”
Yet it is in his vivid and visceral accounts of the Romantic explorers Joseph Banks and Mungo Park, whose voyages were both exterior and interior, that Holmes is best able to unite scientific and poetic “wonder.” Wordsworth had imagined Newton “voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.” When Banks accompanied Captain Cook to Tahiti and witnessed exotic practices like surfing and tattooing and various erotic rites, he returned to England a changed man; as president of the Royal Society, he steadily encouraged others, like Park, to venture into the unknown.
“His heart,” Holmes writes of Park, “was a terra incognita quite as mysterious as the interior of Africa.” At one low point in his African travels in search of Timbuktu, alone and naked and 500 miles from the nearest European settlement, Park noticed a piece of moss “not larger than the top of one of my fingers” pushing up through the hard dirt. “At this moment, painful as my reflections were, the extraordinary beauty of a small moss in fructification irresistibly caught my eye,” he wrote, sounding a great deal like the Ancient Mariner. “I could not contemplate the delicate conformation of its roots, leaves and capsula, without admiration.”
For Holmes, the “age of wonder” draws to a close with Darwin’s voyage aboard the Beagle in 1831, partly inspired by those earlier Romantic voyages. “With any luck,” Holmes writes wistfully, “we have not yet quite outgrown it.” Still, it’s hard to read his luminous and horizon-expanding “Age of Wonder” without feeling some sense of diminution in our own imaginatively circumscribed times. “To us, their less tried successors, they appear magnified,” as Joseph Conrad, one of Park’s admirers, wrote in “Lord Jim,” “pushing out into the unknown in obedience to an inward voice, to an impulse beating in the blood, to a dream of the future. They were wonderful; and it must be owned they were ready for the wonderful.”
Christopher Benfey is the Mellon professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. His books include “A Summer of Hummingbirds” and an edition of Lafcadio Hearn’s “American Writings” for the Library of America.
以《小说修辞学》一举成名的韦恩·C.布 斯,其一生的浩瀚著述已成为文学研究领域的一座巨大宝藏,而本书撷取了其中最耀眼的十几颗经典之珠,汇成了一部“精华中的精华”,从各个层面展现了这位举 足轻重的批评家对文学、修辞学等多个研究领域的重要贡献,其充满智慧的哲思和雄辩有力的文风更是发人深省,振奋人心。作为韦恩·C.布斯漫长而荣耀的学术生涯的完美总结,本书是一部意义深远的纪念之作,它将带领我们更好地去探索听与说、读与写之艺术。
作者简介: 韦恩·C.布斯(1921—2005) 美国著名文学批评家,芝加哥大学教授。1961年出版的《小说修辞学》被学术界称为“二十世纪小说理论的里程碑”,他本人也被誉为“文学批评家的批评家”。另著有《反讽修辞学》(1974)、《批评的理解:多元论的力量与局限》(1979)、《我们所交的朋友:小说伦理学》(1988)、《修辞的修辞学》(2004)等。 |
圖2:舊香居店照。(林國彰/攝影)
舊香居靜靜座落於龍泉街巷弄中,介於熱鬧與靜謐,青春洋溢與淵博資深之間。不論從各種角度來看,似乎都帶有些微妙的特質。位於人潮雜沓的市集附近,但行 人轉過身就可以走進有綠蔭的安靜巷弄;店齡本身其實還年輕,但淵源又可追溯到早年國際學舍旁,以鑑識字畫古籍聞名的「日聖書店」;家族兩代共同累積三十年 的豐富經驗,但卻又不像某些老店背負著歷史沉重包袱,必須維持原有樣貌,不能恣意創新。 「新與舊」是舊香居很有意思的特色與現象。店裡有珍貴的古籍文 獻,但也有近年出版的文史哲、藝術書籍,以及港台的小眾出版品。往來的客人中有父執輩的藏書家,也有對文學藝術心生嚮往的年輕學生,有作家學者,也有尋常 愛書家庭散步時路過停留,但並不產生互斥或排擠的影響。整家店不論是書或人,都產生一種既自由卻又自律的樣貌,不至於讓人覺得拘謹或過於嚴肅,各方面都達 成一種奇妙的平衡。 這是份始自愛書家庭的終身志業,在這個焦慮的年代,他們邀請了幾位熟悉朋友,和大家分享藏書的樂趣。
顾彬教授向来以直言不讳闻名,在过去的数年中,他对中国当代文学作品的抨击也引起了舆论的强烈反响,至今仍未平息。
德国之声:您为什么要用体裁划分的方式,来编写这部中国文学史?
顾彬教授:中国文学非常丰富,中国历史非常非常 长,如果不分体裁的话,那我怕我们对中国的诗歌、散文和小说不一定能够进行全面的介绍,也不能说明白为什么那些代表作品有那么伟大。所以我也是效仿那些日 耳曼文学家,他们过去写德国文学史的时候,都是集中在一个体裁之上,比方说德国诗歌史,德国小说史,等等。
德国之声:那这几个体裁中您个人最喜欢什么呢?
顾彬教授:我自己非常非常喜欢中国的诗歌和散文,因为我自己也写诗歌和散文,我觉得中国的诗歌和散文是非常了不起的,属于世界文学。
德国之声:您觉得评价一个文学作品好或是不好,应该有什么标准呢?
顾彬教授:第一我从语言来看,第二是形式,第三是内容。如果一个作家老用别人用过的语言,如果创作形式没有新意,如果他的思想都是老一套的话,那这么一个作家只能让我感到非常无聊。所以一个作家应该有自己的语言、自己的创作形式和自己的世界观。
德国之声:您曾经提到,中国自从1949年之后,基本上没有多少优秀作品,您觉得原因是什么呢?
顾彬教授:我没有说过49年以后没有优秀作品, 比方说58年发表的老舍的《茶馆》,老舍六十年代最后写的一部作品,虽然没有写完,但也是一部了不起的小说。另外,我还非常喜欢王蒙五十年代写的小说,从 今天来看还是值得读。另外,80年代中国无论是诗歌还是短篇、中篇小说,有一些代表作今天也是可以再看一看的。其中一些我们也可以归入世界文学。中国当代 文学的问题是到了92年才慢慢开始。因为89年前后,中国作家自己背叛了文学,他们为了赚钱而下海之后,放弃了创作。这也是为什么不光是我,好多德国汉学 家都对中国当代作家抱有很大怀疑的原因。
德国之声:您刚才也说到,比如说老舍的作品,还有中国的古典文学作品,都可以算作是世界文学,那么归入世界文学的标准是什么呢?
顾彬教授:我的标准很简单,还是语言、形式、思想。我的标准是中国49年以前的优秀作品,比如鲁迅;我的标准是德国45年以前的文学作品;此外,顾城、北岛、翟永明等诗人,80年代的一些小说家,也是不错的,也可以看成一种标准。
德国之声:您曾经批评过中国最近几年的一些文学作品,比如《狼图腾》,还有一些类似棉棉、卫惠这样的"美女作家",但是他们的作品今年在法兰克福书展之际,也先后翻译成德语,在德国出版。您觉得这些作品尽管您评价不高,但仍然有推荐给德国读者的必要和意义吗?
顾彬教授:我应该从客观的角度来回答你的问题。 我是主张精英的,但要所有读者都认同我是不可能的,很可能大部分读者都觉得我有问题。 德国大部分读者都想读通俗文学,对他们来说,莫言、余华、苏童、棉棉、姜戎他们都代表中国通俗文学。如果读者不想看语言作品非常高的作品,我也可以理解, 我不反对他们看棉棉、姜戎,但是我自己一辈子都不会看他们的作品。
德国之声:您刚才也提到,您原本很不喜欢冰心的作品,但是过了很多年之后再读的时候,却又发现她的东西还是有可取之处的。那么有没有可能您再过多年之后,回头看现在的一些中国文学作品时,也会有不同的评价呢?
顾彬教授:我觉得不大可能。因为中国当代的一些 作家,特别是小说家,他们的语言水平都太低了。当时我看冰心的作品是看内容,但是当前的一些中国作家我都是看他们的语言和思路。他们没有什么思想,语言水 平也太低了。另外他们写作都是匆匆忙忙,莫言的《生死疲劳》是40多天之内写完的,另外一部作品是90天写完的,一个德国作家一年才能写出100页来,莫 言能在两三个月之内写800页出来,从德国的角度看,他很有问题。
德国之声:您说自己有一种向德国介绍中国文学的责任感,是不是不管好的不好的您都要介绍给德国?
顾彬教授:不论我对某一个作家重视与否,作为一个历史学家我都应该介绍。所以在我的《中国20世纪文学史》中,也包括一些我非常讨厌的作家和作品。
德国之声:让我们再来谈谈今年的法兰克福书展,因为中国是今年的主宾国,但是书展还没开幕,中国就已经受到了强烈的批评,比如说,这次书展期间翻译出版的书、包括前来参加书展的作家,都是中国官方挑选的,而您个人比较欣赏的北岛,就不在被邀请之列,您怎么看待这个问题?
顾彬教授:我们也应该冷静地谈一谈这个问题。为 什么呢,北岛现在是美国人,所以他还能够代表中国大陆去吗?可能会,也可能不会。这是第一个问题。第二个问题呢,听说这次莫言、余华他们也来,但是我们不 能说他们完全代表中国政府,还是中国共产党,或是中国整个国家,他们也有自己个人的立场。所以也有人说,莫言会通过他的小说批评中国的现状,如果他的批评 有道理的话,中国还是邀请他来参加法兰克福书展。从他们的角度来看,是勇敢的,是不错的。所以我们不应该再用非白即黑的看法来谈中国和德国的情况。
德国之声:您以前说过,中国的作家中缺乏敢于说话的人,刘晓波其实就是一个敢说话的人,但是他不久前刚刚被中国当局正式逮捕了。中国也因此受到了国际社会的批评,您怎么看?
顾彬教授:不应该逮捕他,这是个错误。他对中国 的批评从我们德国人来看,还算不上什么批判。原本中国应该接受这些批评的,但是我估计有一些人还是觉得中国目前非常弱,好像把刘晓波看成一个强者。这说明 中国内部有一个很大的问题:中国给我们一种感觉,就是中国的领导层觉得自己太弱,不够自信。一个刘晓波是不可能改变中国的。
德国之声:您曾经说过,政治应该和文学分开,但是从刘晓波的例子上,我们可以看出,政治和文学是很难分开的。
顾彬教授:政治和文学这两个方面是非常非常复杂的。从49年以后,中国作家越来越忽视语言的重要性,而把他们的作品变成政治的工具,这就背叛了文学。一个作家的首要任务是为语言而服务,如果他为语言服务之后还有力气关心政治的话,我不反对。
德国之声:最后还想问问您下一步在学术上有什么打算。
顾彬教授:我应该先收拾收拾我家、我的图书馆,思考将来做什么。因为我大概还能活个三、四十年,那这三、四十年之内我还能写不少书,我可能将来会写一本关于李白的书,因为西方目前还没有;也可能会写一本关于苏东坡的书,德国也没有。
采访记者:雨涵
责编:乐然