متن زیر را به فارسی تبدیل کن

It’s always about desire, which may or may not involve sex but is just as
powerful nonetheless. Characters are driven, and the thing that drives them is
desire.
Is this why saints so rarely feature prominently in novels? Perhaps. Mostly,
though, they’re just not really very interesting, narratively. Consider the
Confessions of St. Augustine—is this the focus on his many years as priest and
bishop? Not at all. He wrote them around age forty and had only converted to
Catholicism at age thirty-hree; moreover, the narrative of his life more or less
stops at his conversion, with the last several chapters taken up by meditations on
such religious matters as Genesis and the Trinity. Or Herman Hesse’s
Siddhartha. He may reach something like enlightenment, but the bulk of the
novel is taken up with the searching, error, and struggle prior to attaining insight.
Why? Because saints lack desire. They don’t want anything and as such aren’t
going anywhere we’ll be interested in watching. Admire? Sure. Emulate? We’d
do well to. Read about with fascination? Not happening.
Faulkner knew this. He doesn’t have much truck with saintly types, and
when he does give us a Dilsey, in The Sound and the Fury (1929), he keeps her
firmly in the background. Out front, the Compsons are frantically clawing and
scratching at their desires, whether Benjy’s to return to a happier childhood
when his beloved sister Caddy was still around, Quentin’s to assuage guilt and
shame at his own conduct and that of his family, or Jason’s to acquire material
gain. Faulknerian characters are the neediest, most obsessive creatures ever
invented. His novels teem with brooding, scheming monomaniacs pursuing their
idiocentric mythologies. Even his saints, or the would-be versions, display wild
fixations. Isaac McCaslin, who in Go Down, Moses (1942) truly wants to atone
to his heretofore unacknowledged black kinsmen for the treatment of their
forebears by his white ancestors, particularly his grandfather Carothers
McCaslin, gives away the estate in ways that destroy his marriage and make him
suspect in the eyes of his neighbors. His refusal to own the plantation drops it
into the hands of his cousin McCaslin Edmonds, who is a less understanding and
moral person than Isaac himself. He does make sure that money entailed for the
descendants of McCaslin slaves gets into the right hands, even traveling to
Arkansas to hunt down one heir. Isaac is ethical but also excessively scrupulous.
From the Snopes family avarice to Sartoris honor, Faulkner’s characters create
mayhem and calamity for themselves through their obsessions, and those
obsessions come to readers through emblems. Pick up one of his books and
you’ll soon find driven people and their signs. Any book will do.
And then there’s As I Lay Dying. We have many reasons to teach this gem of
a novel, but one of the most compelling is that character motivation is so darned
available. Everyone in the dysfunctional Bundren family (a tautology when
reading Faulkner, but these people are special even for him) has a secret, a
burning desire, an obsession—and a thing to represent it, what T. S. Eliot calls
an “objective correlative.” Jewel, the angry son, has his spotted horse. Forty
years later and it would have been a muscle car, a Mustang or GTO that he had
worked and scrimped to be able to almost afford and that he would lose, as he
does the horse, through the agency of his improvident, self-involved father. The
joke, of course, is that Anse is not his father, that Jewel is illegitimate, and that
his obsession is escaping the leaden, earthbound condition of his family. Jewel
couldn’t tell you what his desire is, and if he tried, he would probably say it’s the
horse, but it’s not the horse. It’s so much bigger than that. Anse himself wants a
new set of teeth, or seems to. His “determination” to get Addie to Jefferson for
burial masks his wish for new chompers. Yet they’re not the real desire. That has
to do with going on with life, maybe even with finding, as he announces in the
novel’s last line that he has, a new wife. Now, you can’t very well say, before
your wife is even in her coffin, that you’re aimin’ to go to town and get yourself
a new one. Even someone as low as Anse Bundren probably can’t admit that to
himself. But you can say you need new dentures and, as long as you’re headed
that way anyhow, well…why not? Vardaman, who is still a child, needs to
understand things beyond him, matters of life and death and what dying really
means. He’s so concerned that his mother is in that box and still alive that he
drills holes into the coffin lid—and into her—to provide air for her. His objective
correlative is easy, since he tells you all about it: “My mother is a fish,” he says
in the shortest and most memorable chapter in all of literature. Vardaman catches
an enormous fish, nearly as big as he is, and when Anse makes him clean it
himself, he confuses the fish and the mother and living and dying and about
every other thing in his world, so that, when he comes out with his famous
pronouncement, it shocks not because it’s outrageous but because it’s so
perfectly understandable. What else would he say? Even Cash, who seems to be
concerned only with making the coffin for his mother, is driven by desire. His is
to feel nothing, to push feeling, with which he is profoundly uncomfortable, as
far away as he can. He does this by obsessing on the box’s construction, one of
his narrative chapters consisting entirely of a list of his thirteen reasons for
cutting the corners on the bevel. Focus is good. Attention to detail is good. But
when a person focuses that intently on a fairly straightforward bit of logic, he is
seriously trying to avoid something else. Dewey Dell, the teenaged sister in this
tragicomedy troupe, wants as badly as her father to get to Jefferson, where she’s
heard the druggist might have a cure for her complaint. She’s pregnant. Only
Darl, the eldest son, seems immune from his family’s penchant for obsessive
thinking. What a relief, we think—one semi-normal person in the bunch. He
winds up in the insane asylum. The Bundrens are, by turns, appalling, hilarious,
touching, frustrating, and shocking. But mostly, they are—and this makes them a
teacher’s dream—readily accessible.