متن زیر را به فارسی تبدیل کن
I recently visited a high school English class full of very bright kids. Since it
was the penultimate day on which they would ever be high school kids, they
were also very happy, but that’s another story. We spent an hour together talking
about Katherine Mansfield and Shakespeare and the avalanche of Jane Austen
films, sequels, prequels, and jonquils, and toward the end Dickens came up. The
teacher mentioned that they had read Great Expectations, so I asked, less than
naively, “Well, what did you think?” And being bright, motivated kids who
know the expected answer, they said, more or less convincingly, “It was good.”
Some used “really” in their sentence, but they all generally agreed. All but one.
The class curmudgeon said it wasn’t all that great and didn’t move him deeply. I
liked him better immediately. It takes courage, even on your next-to-last day of
high school, to say you’re in AP English and aren’t wild about one of the
established classics. For one thing, there’s the weight of more than a century of
received opinion going against you. And in this case the wild popularity of those
novels in the author’s own lifetime. Clearly, this kid was swimming against the
literary current. And that’s fine. We can’t all like the same books, the same films,
the same songs, despite what mass-marketing and American Idol might have us
believe. Or even the same things about said books, films, and songs.
Anyway, as I was driving back home past newly planted cornfields and
construction zones, his response made me think back on my own encounters
with Great Expectations. How did I feel about it? How do I feel about it now?
Let me preface this by saying that it has been nearly forty years, so I may not
accurately recall everything about that first reading. I remember clearly, though,
two things in particular: a sense of confusion early on, both in Pip’s encounter
with the escaped Magwitch and in his domestic arrangement with his sister and
her husband, and outrage at the ending. The first, I subsequently learned, is fairly
typical of the opening gambits in Dickens’s novels, and nowhere near the
murkiness and fog in the Court of Chancery at the outset of Bleak House. That
second one, though, that’s another story. Ruined the novel for me. No kidding—
absolutely ruined it. It was abrupt, suspiciously so. False. Insincere. Hokey. And
just plain dumb. So what was it that triggered this venom? Merely this.
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the
morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the
evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil
light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
Even allowing for some changes in sensibility between 1861, the year of the
novel’s publication, and 1969, the year of my encounter with it, this was just
wrong. Had Pip learned nothing through all his suffering? Could he not see that
happiness was never possible with Estella, no matter how much she had been
changed by her own experiences? Didn’t he have at least a shred of pride? And
et cetera.
In case you don’t know the story, here’s the gist: Pip had once been engaged
as a playmate and companion for Estella by an ancient harridan named Miss
Havisham, who saw the young girl as her instrument for wreaking vengeance on
the male sex for having stood her up at the marriage altar (she lives out her days
in her wedding dress amid the wreckage of the aborted reception feast). Pip,
although neither knows it, is Estella’s practice victim, the boy on whom she can
perfect cruelty. She gets rather good at it. Of course they meet later in life, of
course she leads him on but marries another, of course he’s a fool of the first
order to believe that he loves her, much less the reverse; otherwise, there’s no
need for this famous final scene. Then, after much misery on both sides, they
just happen (of all Dickens’s contrivances, one of the most contrived) to meet at
the burnt-out ruins of Miss Havisham’s mansion. Some cursory apologies are
exchanged, but nothing momentous enough to prepare for the hearts-and-violins
ending. So naturally, my future self was appalled. Some of it, I suppose, had to
do with being a teenaged male who took rejection by girls about as badly as the
next guy. If memory serves, I was also what could generously be called
“between girlfriends.” In fact, fairly far between. Part of it had to do with having
plodded through several hundred pages of hard going, only to have them
trivialized by this “easy” ending, as I saw it. Maybe that’s what my reading
always is, some combination of testosterone, life history, insecurity, male ego,
aesthetic judgment, and gut sense (or nonsense). Hard to judge from the inside.
In any case, that’s what I felt at the time.
But there was one more thing that I felt about that ending but couldn’t have
defended: Dickens didn’t believe it, either. It was an idea. A belief. A conviction.
With nothing whatsoever to back it up.