متن زیر را به بهترین شکل به زبان فارسی تبدیل کن
It’s a mystery. Seriously. Lots of theories posited but nothing decisive. I put
it under the heading of deflection of meaning, by which I mean, broadly, the
alchemical process by which a literal thing comes to stand in figuratively for
some other thing. This bit of magic is the subject of my previous book, How to
Read Literature Like a Professor, but this is almost the only time I’ll employ it
here, and only because it is so critical to the business of creating character. T. S.
Eliot, in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems” (1922) and elsewhere, gives us a
more or less useful term, the “objective correlative,” by which he means the
external set of objects that stand in for some internal emotion or condition. The
objects provide the concrete, tangible images that allow readers or audiences to
grasp the necessarily abstract inner workings of a character. Where Eliot goes
wrong, to the extent that he does, is in insisting that the result of the objective
correlative is to convey one and only one emotion, so that confusion is
impossible. I believe that when very young, Eliot was badly frightened by a
double meaning, hence his determination to exert absolute authorial control.
Rather, the ambiguity is precisely what intrigues in the objective correlative or
character emblem. We can forgive his excess as a product of his age; like so
many of the so-called New Critics, he was also a writer, in his case a writer first
who was also a critic, and so he and they naturally want to cede power in the
writer-reader relationship to the writer, to put the author in authority. What
anyone who came of critical age after about 1965 or so will note, however, is
that the balance of power has shifted, that readers are the ultimate arbiters of
meaning in a work. Besides, the work becomes so much livelier as a space of
engagement when the possibilities are more open-ended, when ambiguity,
indeterminacy, and irony are all in play.
Consider Stephen’s “ashplant.” Joyce gives Stephen Dedalus a walking stick
made of ashwood, an object he acquires first in A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man and carries through to Ulysses. He employs it sometimes in its
designed role, as a cane carried by a young man, sometimes as a fashion
accessory, sometimes as a mock sword or a punctuator for his rapier wit,
sometimes as a weapon, as when he smashes the chandelier in Bella Cohen’s
brothel during the hallucinatory Circe episode of the later novel. When he is
beaten by the soldiers, Stephen has his ashplant, along with his hat, restored to
him by Leopold Bloom. So then, class, what does Stephen’s ashplant stand for?
Oh, it almost certainly has some Freudian possibilities as a phallic symbol, the
more so given the character’s doubts about his manhood. And it is without
question a crutch of sorts, at times. Is it a device for keeping the world at bay?
Probably. Will other readers find other possible explanations and interpretations?
Indubitably. Whatever Joyce may have intended, the matter, like the ashplant, is
out of his hands. The moment the book was published on February 2, 1922, it
ceased to be his and became ours. Thanks all the same, Jim, but further
assistance is no longer required of the author; we’ll make the decisions from
here on out. Writers can suggest meaning and significance, but ultimately,
readers make the final call.
And how are those calls made? Let’s go back to the case(s) of the flowers.
At the start of this chapter, I mentioned two characters with emblematic flowers.
There are lots more, of course, but two will suffice.
First, Nero Wolfe. Wolfe has many character emblems, so many in fact that I
sometimes think the emblems are a substitute for actual characterization.
Perhaps this is generally true of fictional detectives; they’re almost always less
fully developed than main characters in standard novels, yet they seem to have
twice as many tics and signs hanging about them. Wolfe has his great size—a
fifth of a ton, we’re told in more than one novel—as well as his personal chef,
Fritz; his bottles of beer, always delivered to him already opened and waiting;
his dislike of personal contact; his rare books; and his clothing, especially his
invariably yellow shirts. You can do a good deal with any of them. In fact, I once
heard the famous literary biographer Leon Edel hold forth for many minutes on
the significance of a writer named Rex (Latin for king) Stout having a hero
named Nero (as in the emperor), whose stature at four hundred pounds is well
beyond stout. See the fun you can have with books? But the one emblem that
best defines Wolfe is the orchid. He cultivates them in his rooftop greenhouse.
Either they or the greenhouse itself figure into the plots of several of the novels
and stories. They seem almost anomalous at first, being so delicate and small, so
dainty set against his great girth. But both he and they are hothouse creatures. He
almost never leaves the brownstone he calls home. Fresh air is anathema to him.
Like them, he requires very precise and careful handling in order to bring out his
genius. Moreover, they allow him to express his artistic side, to show a passion
completely absent in every other area of his existence. When he is troubled or
perplexed, he retreats to the greenhouse to commune with his orchids, nearly the
only things in his world with which he is never angry. We could learn the things
we know about Wolfe without orchids, but they offer a kind of shortcut to that
knowledge, both revealing and reinforcing aspects of his character in ways both
tangible and vivid.