متن زیر را به فارسی ترجمه کن
Unless it’s a game. Unless you’re merely employing conventions to strip
them of their illusion, in which case you had better be prepared for the backlash.
This is what drives student-readers crazy: What if he’s just playing around?
What if he’s not serious? It seems unfair somehow to the apprentice reader who
is working very hard (usually to find things the professor has promised are in
there—magical things, mysterious things) that the novelist might have regarded
this not work but play. Not only that, but it seems to cause doubt about the whole
fictional enterprise: if we can’t trust Fowles, and he’s using the devices and
practices of the conventional novel, how can we trust any of them?
Well, we can’t. But is that a problem, really? You know a novel is made up
when you open it. Does the illusion have to be “real”? Does that question even
make sense? It does and it doesn’t. We’ve just entered the literary equivalent of
quantum physics, where propositions can be simultaneously true and false,
where waves and particles overlap and matter and energy may be the same thing.
Welcome to metafiction.
Metafiction: fiction (that part is a no-brainer, right?) that is about (meta,
meaning “going beyond” or “involving”), well, fiction. It’s a relatively new term
for a very old practice. If you own the first edition of The American Heritage
Dictionary from the early 1970s, you’ll find it missing. The novelist and
philosopher William H. Gass came up with the term in his book of criticism and
theory, Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970). He means by the term those works
of fiction that self-referentially take as at least part of their concern the making
of fiction; words like “self-referential,” “reflexive,” and “self-conscious”
routinely pop up in discussions of metafiction. In the first instance, Gass was
trying to describe a phenomenon of his own time: the many stories and novels
that were then appearing by writers like John Barth, Robert Coover, B. S.
Johnson, Christine Brooke-Rose, Italo Calvino, Fowles, and of course Gass
himself. But the sort of story he means goes way back. How far back is “way
back”? Maybe all the way. It goes something like this: on night one, Caveman
Alley told a story, and on night two Caveman Oop told one that, at some point
included the phrase, “Now here’s what stories typically do, so I will (a) do it or
(b) not do it with my story.” Or he would have done that had parentheses been
invented. In fact, Caveman Alley may even have started off with, “So you know
how stories go…” After all, why wait for night two? In any case, metafiction
was born.
You doubt? Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
is a play that toys with a couple of hapless minor figures from Hamlet. So that’s
metatheater, a near cousin to metafiction. But so is its source. Hamlet has that
whole business of a play within a play and instructions to the players on how to
present his little drama, and that’s 1600. Shakespeare does that sort of thing all
the time, play after play, where either there’s an actual play, as in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, or there’s an act being put on for someone else’s benefit, as in
Much Ado About Nothing. And we know he’s not the first. Geoffrey Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales (1384) involves a set of pilgrims going to the great cathedral
town for Easter, during which trip they tell stories. Sometimes the stories conflict
with other stories, or animosities from real life spill over into the stories (or vice
versa), or, as in the case of the Pardoner and his tale, the teller gets so carried
away that he forgets where he is and does something inappropriate, for which the
other pilgrims give him a tongue-lashing. There’s a lot of material in the Tales
for the savvy critic of metafiction.
But wait, as the infomercials say, there’s more. It turns out the idea isn’t
original to Chaucer. The recently deceased Giovanni Boccaccio got there first,
with his Decameron. His group of ten young people fleeing Florence during an
outbreak of the Black Death each tell ten stories over the course of two weeks.
This tidy phalanx of narratives covers a pretty full range of possibility, and the
framing device necessarily calls attention to the artificiality of the setup: these
are stories made to order for a special situation. The work constantly reminds us
that it is a work of fiction, that in fact there’s nothing natural about this
enterprise. Is that as far back as we go? Hardly. Homer and Virgil both invoke
muses, but with a difference. Homer, to the extent that such a personage existed,
was an oral poet-singer; he needed all the breath and wit he could muster, so
routinely at moments of great stress he calls on the muses to help him out. Virgil,
by contrast, is a writer and not a singer, so no such need of breath or immediate
recall; when he calls on the muses, he does so in virtual quotation marks,
because that’s what composers of epics do. We could go further back if need be,
but you get the point.
So this meta-whatever has been going on for a good little while. What’s that
you say? Chaucer and Boccaccio, to say nothing of Virgil, aren’t novelists. Ah, I
see. Consider the constituent elements of the novel: book-length, fictive,
multicharacter, main plot plus subplots, narrative, prose. What’s missing? Only
the last one. And I’ll admit, it’s a big one. But in the time of Chaucer and before,
virtually no respectable literature was written in prose. Ergo, verse. Given the
interests of all three writers, the complexity and shapeliness of their narratives,
they clearly provide models for early novelists. Besides, the word is not
“metanovel” but “metafiction.” And never forget this other fact: novelists will
steal from anywhere. Anyone. Any time. The magpies of the literary world,
novelists.