متن زیر را به فارسی تبدیل کن

Okay, then, a couple of years later, and Tom’s reading the novel again. A
college class, this time; he would not willingly return to the scene of that
particular crime. Same novel, different edition. Now here’s the beauty of it: this
novel has the standard text and the originally intended ending. Much more
Hemingway, Jake Barnes, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Also the story of sage
advice from a clearly inferior novelist, Edward Bulwer-Lytton (he gave us “It
was a dark and stormy night”—no kidding), to lose the downer ending and
please the punters. “Aha!” says Tom. “I knew it. That ending really was
contrived.” Or words to that effect. So now the novel is merely smudged and not
hopelessly blighted.
Which leads to another reading some years on. This time Tom sees
something he hasn’t noticed before: “I could see no shadow of a further parting
from her.” Not, “There would be no further parting.” Well, then, that’s different.
That’s maybe what he sensed but missed the first reading—an out-clause.
Dickens seems to be throwing a sop to readers but acknowledging that it is a sop.
Pip can’t see even a shadow of another parting. So what? When could he ever
see a thing before it happened to him? When was he ever attentive to signs and
portents? You can believe this, dear reader, if you want, but I’m going to leave a
thread of doubt with which the Properly Dubious can unravel this false tapestry.
I heard that. What do you mean, “But did Dickens intend that meaning?” He
wrote it, didn’t he? Besides, his influence is limited; Elvis has left the building.
It’s not his novel anymore. It’s ours. His and mine. His and yours. Chiefly, yours
and mine. It stopped being his alone when he gave it to us.
Well, what about the writer’s intentions? I’m with Huck on that one: I don’t
put no stock in dead people. And here’s the thing: once the writer sends the final
edit back to his publisher, he’s toast. His impact on the novel is finished. Of
course, a lot of the writers we read are dead, and the rest will be (sorry, just my
morbid side coming through), but body temperature isn’t the issue: in terms of
the text, once it’s published, he’s already past tense. The living presence in the
now of the text is the reader. The novelist provides the stuff of the novel—facts,
events, structure, characters, dialogue, narrative, description, beginning, middle,
and end. All the hard data from “Once upon a” to “ever after.” Without which, of
course, there are no readers. Readers bring interpretation, analysis, sympathy,
hostility, cheers, and catcalls. Writers make novels; readers make them live.
So here’s something to live by, the Law for All Reading: Own the novels
you read. (Poems, too. Also stories, essays, plays—you get the idea.) I don’t
mean purchase a copy, although for self-evident and self-serving reasons, I’m
not against it. I mean take psychological and intellectual possession of those
works. Make them yours. You’re not a frightened schoolchild asking for extra
gruel (there’s that Dickens guy again). You’re a grown-up person having a
conversation with another one. That the two of you have never met and the other
one may be dead is immaterial. It’s still a conversation, a meeting of minds and
imaginations, and yours matters as much as the writer’s.
What’s interesting about this transaction is how readers both embrace and
resist that ownership. Over the years, my work has drifted forward in the
twentieth century, from Joyce and Yeats and Lawrence, which is where I began,
toward postmodernism. If you can forgive me for bringing up the metafictionists
one more time, one of the things they insist upon is the provisional nature of
reality and, therefore, of meaning. We see this most clearly in the dual endings of
The French Lieutenant’s Woman, of course, but it’s there in the rest of Fowles, as
well, and especially in The Magus. When I’ve taught that novel, the most
frequently asked question is, “What happened?” Followed very closely by, “Did
it happen?” Is Nicholas the beneficiary, if that’s the right word, of a
psychodrama staged for his improvement by the mysterious Conchis? How
should he interpret it? How should we interpret him interpreting it? And so on.
Needless to say, not all members of the class are happy with the lack of certainty
Fowles offers in the narrative, but many, probably most, are. Again and again in
Fowles and his contemporaries, readers are given opportunities, even required,
to construct meaning.