متن زیر را به بهترین شکل به زبان فارسی برگردان
His characters are sometimes described as grotesques, yet it’s
grotesquery with a purpose. They must remain not only memorable but vivid for
readers over the long stretch of months. Nor is he alone among Victorian
serialized novelists. A quick glance, if such a thing is possible, at William
Makepeace Thackeray or George Meredith or Anthony Trollope or Thomas
Hardy or even the comparatively restrained George Eliot reveals a wealth of
vivid and occasionally outlandish figures, especially among minor characters.
Even once the historical wheel had turned and left the serialized novel
behind, writers continued to use emblems to express character. We may think of
Jay Gatsby in terms of the green light, but the things that mark him out are shirts.
Nick Carraway can scarcely take his eyes off Gatsby’s clothes, so items of
apparel show up repeatedly in the description. When he goes to Nick’s house to
await Daisy’s arrival, for instance, he’s wearing “a white flannel suit, silver shirt,
and gold colored tie.” Doesn’t exactly take a semiologist to interpret those signs,
does it? The real show stopper, however, is the scene when Gatsby, giving Nick
and Daisy the tour of his house, pauses to throw shirt after shirt after shirt on a
table while telling how he has them tailored in London, until he has created a
large, disheveled mound of “stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple￾green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue.” Daisy,
overcome by materialistic fellow feeling, sinks down among the garments in
tears, declaring them “such beautiful shirts” that they make her sad. Without any
authorial commentary, Fitzgerald manages to convey volumes about both Gatsby
and Daisy—not only their individual character traits but a strong sense of what’s
wrong in the relationship between them. Honestly, can two people get any
shallower than these two textile mavens? They’re virtually inarticulate about
feelings during this meeting that all parties recognize as a disaster, but thank
heaven they both speak the language of shirt.
Throughout the modern and postmodern eras, character emblems continue to
play a role, although those roles are not always the same. The licorice-flavored
Blackjack chewed by the title character in Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato
expresses, along with his dribbling a basketball in his Vietnam foxhole, his
childlike and often inappropriate soldierly demeanor. In Hemingway’s The Sun
Also Rises, Jake Barnes’s war wound has plot, character, and thematic
implications. It renders him incapable of consummating his relationship with
Lady Brett Ashley, thwarting their passion for each other and sending them off
on their misadventures, and it speaks more generally to the sterility, sexual and
otherwise, of society in the wake of the Great War.
Emblems are particularly useful in that signature modern genre, the mystery,
where they can be a sort of shorthand, as Agatha Christie certainly understood.
Hercule Poirot is a virtual flotilla of signs, including his “moustaches” and his
drink of preference, a small tisane, and Miss Marple has her knitting. These
items position the characters in a specific way within their worlds. Even when
the first Poirot mystery appeared, for instance, his spats were a sign of a rather
old-fashioned fashion plate, a sort of fuddy-duddy dandy. That description pretty
neatly summarizes Poirot. Nor did Christie invent anything here. This practice
goes back at a minimum to Sherlock Holmes, with his deerstalker (which he
actually wears infrequently), his meerschaum pipe, and his seven per cent
solution of cocaine. Within a generation, detectives and recurring cops all had
their personal talismans, from Lord Peter Wimsey’s monocle to Nick and Nora
Charles’s fox terrier, Asta, to Nero Wolfe’s orchids and yellow shirt, on down to
the cooking of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser (and come to think of it, is Hawk—or
any sidekick—a character emblem? Is Susan Silverman, his longtime, sometime
lady friend?) and the blues recordings (female singers, all) of Linda Barnes’s
Carlotta Carlyle. On the other hand, if a female detective is 6-foot-1 with
flaming red hair, as Carlotta is, does she need any further elaboration?
Sometimes these emblems can form a sort of motif in their repetition. In A
Passage to India, E. M. Forster develops the character of Dr. Aziz through his
conveyances, from the polo pony he rides when we first meet him, to the bicycle
he rides to dinner with friends and which is stolen there, to the tonga he has to
engage when summoned to the English officers’ club (and which is summarily
commandeered by a group of English women, forcing him to walk home), to the
train he takes for the ill-fated trip into the Malabar Hills, to the police car taking
him to jail after his arrest, to the landau he rides in during the celebration of his
“victory” in court, and finally to the horses he and Cyril Fielding ride in the
novel’s last scene. We track Aziz’s progress, if it can be called that, through his
conveyances. In his first appearance, he bicycles to his friend Hamidullah’s, then
takes the pony-drawn tonga to the Chandrapore Club when his tire goes flat. To
be reminded that the club is whites-only while simultaneously watching English
women take his tonga as if by right is to be put in his place quite rudely. Later,
after the dismissal of charges, he is swept away by forces quite beyond his
control—there’s a near-riot in progress—in the relative grandeur of a landau.